GOP candidates back in Ohio as 'success' party

TAMPA, Fla. - What was a trial balloon last week in Powell is now a national battle cry for Republicans.

Joe Vardon, The Columbus Dispatch

TAMPA, Fla. — What was a trial balloon last week in Powell is now a national battle cry for Republicans.

“In America, we celebrate success. We don’t apologize for it,” GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney said to the country during his televised acceptance speech on Thursday night at the packed Tampa Bay Times Forum.

Romney will campaign in Cincinnati this morning with the Republican National Convention behind him — a week when he and his surrogates framed the GOP as the party that embraces success and the Democrats as the ones who attack it.

Sources said Romney’s running mate, U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, will attend a portion of today’s noontime football game pitting Ohio State against Miami University, his alma mater. A Romney campaign official would say only that Ryan will be in central Ohio today.

Romney and Ryan made the point last week in a joint appearance in Powell that success, particularly in business, should be celebrated. And it quickly became clear that Republicans would use their convention to turn a summer of blistering critiques by President Barack Obama’s campaign of Romney’s personal wealth and history at Bain Capital against the Democrats.

By the time Romney had said on Thursday night that “the centerpiece of the president’s entire re-election campaign is attacking success,” everyone from Romney’s wife to the national party chairman already had issued similar indictments.

“It amazes me to see his history of success actually being attacked,” Ann Romney said Tuesday night. “Are those really the values that made our country great?”

The same day, Republican National Chairman Reince Priebus said Obama and Democrats are “ satisfied with attacking the American dream.”Earlier, the GOP chairman told Ohio delegates about how parents point out that big home in the neighborhood and tell their kids that they’re praying for the same thing for them, or even a house twice as big.One reason Republicans went there time and again in their speeches this week: Obama’s campaign ads and attack lines are effective. For months, Romney has endured assaults over everything from his refusal to release more tax returns to his off-shore bank accounts. He was criticized for the profits he made at Bain Capital while the firm drove companies it acquired into bankruptcy, and the car elevator at his home in California. That narrative may well continue on Monday when Obama visits Toledo and Cleveland.

“The question we’ve raised about Gov. Romney’s experience is he’s told everyone his goal was job creation in the private sector, but even his partners have admitted it was profit creation at any costs,” said Obama-campaign press secretary Ben LaBolt, who was in Tampa for the Republicans’ convention.

“He profited off of outsourcing jobs and bankrupting companies. The question we’ve raised: Is that who Ohioans or all Americans want to see in the Oval Office, someone who says that that’s what formed his experience and his policy?”

LaBolt rejects the Republicans’ “success” argument, pointing to the 18 tax cuts he said Obama has given to small businesses.

But for Republicans, the argument stretches beyond Romney’s personal wealth, and yes, it includes a rejection of Obama’s tax policies.

The president wants to let the Bush-era tax cuts expire for individuals making $200,000 per year and families making $250,000 or more. He’s also proposed that people making more than $1 million per year pay a minimum 30 percent tax rate — it’s known as the Buffett Rule. Obama portrays this as people paying their fair share; Republicans call it a punishment of success.

There’s also Obama’s “you didn’t build that” line relating to businesses, which Democrats say was taken out of context but Republicans hammered on all week as they made their case.

Republicans throughout the week also decried “regulations” the Obama administration has placed on businesses, though those regulations often go unnamed. They throw Obama’s federal health-care law into the mix as well.

“I get to talking about punishing success when I talk about higher taxes on risk-taking and investment,” Gov. John Kasich said. “If you’re going to tax risk-taking higher, people are going to take fewer risks. I think it’s an issue. I think managing the debt’s an issue. … Regulations. It’s all those things.”

LaBolt counters that “Romney and Ryan have refused to ask the wealthy for a single dime to help reduce the deficit, and every bipartisan panel that’s looked at this said it’s impossible to reduce the deficit without additional revenue.”

He said Obama wants to return to the tax rates from the Clinton era — a time of balanced budgets and robust employment. Both campaigns agree the election this fall is a choice between these differing beliefs.

But is Obama actually envious or disdainful of Americans’ success, as his opponents charge?

“I don’t think the Democrats are, but there is a segment of the population that is and they play to their emotions. They’re using that to get them to vote for them,” said Timothy Manning, an Ohio Republican delegate from Willoughby Hills.

jvardon@dispatch.com

@joevardon

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